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One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education

The headquarters of what has rapidly become the largest school in the world, at 10 million students strong, is stuffed into a few large communal rooms in a decaying 1960s office building hard by the commuter rail tracks in Mountain View, Calif. Despite the cramped, dowdy circumstances, youthful optimism at the Khan Academy abounds. At the weekly organization-wide meeting, discussion about translating their offerings into dozens of languages is sandwiched between a video of staffers doing weird dances with their hands and plans for upcoming camping and ski trips.

Pivoting, Salman Khan, the 36-year-old founder, cracks a sports joke appropriate for someone who holds multiple degrees from MIT and Harvard. It involves LeBron James (a Khan Academy fan), three-point shots and sophisticated algorithms called Monte Carlo simulations. The company’s 37 employees, mostly software developers with stints at places like Google and Facebook, are the types who know when to laugh. And they do.

It’s a prototypical Silicon Valley ethos, with one exception: The Khan Academy, which features 3,400 short instructional videos along with interactive quizzes and tools for teachers to chart student progress, is a nonprofit, boasting a mission of “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” There is no employee equity; there will be no IPO; funding comes from philanthropists, not venture capitalists.

“I could have started a for-profit, venture-backed business that has a good spirit, and I think there are many of them–Google for instance,” says Khan, his eyes dancing below his self-described unibrow. “Maybe I could reach a billion people. That is high impact, but what happens in 50 years?”

It’s a fair question, with an increasingly sure answer: The next half-century of education innovation is being shaped right now. After decades of yammering about “reform,” with more and more money spent on declining results, technology is finally poised to disrupt how people learn. And that creates immense opportunities for both for-profit entrepreneurs and nonprofit agitators like Khan.

How immense? According to a report from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, global spending on education is $3.9 trillion, or 5.6% of planetary GDP. America spends the most–about $1.3 trillion a year–yet the U.S. ranks 25th out of the 34 OECD countries in mathematics, 17th in science and 14th in reading. And, as in so many other areas of American life, those averages obscure a deeper divide: The U.S. is the only developed country to have high proportions of both top and bottom performers. About a fifth of American 15-year-olds do not have basic competence in science; 23% can’t use math in daily life.

It’s those latter statistics that motivate Khan. The site covers a staggering array of topics–from basic arithmetic and algebra to the electoral college and the French Revolution. The videos are quirky affairs where you never see the instructor (usually Salman Khan himself, who personally has created nearly 3,000 of them). Instead, students are confronted with a blank digital blackboard, which, over the course of a ten-minute lesson narrated in Khan’s soothing baritone, is gradually filled up with neon-colored scrawls illustrating key concepts. The intended effect is working through homework at the kitchen table with your favorite uncle looking over your shoulder.

Or make that the planet’s favorite uncle. Over the past two years Khan Academy videos have been viewed more than 200 million times. The site is used by 6 million unique students each month (about 45 million total over the last 12 months), who have collectively solved more than 750 million problems (about 2 million a day), and the material, which is provided at no cost, is (formally or informally) part of the curriculum in 20,000 classrooms around the world. Volunteers have translated Khan’s videos into 24 different languages, including Urdu, Swahili and Chinese.

“Sal is the world’s first superstar teacher,” says Yuri Milner, the Russian physicist turned venture capitalist who was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter and Groupon.

Beyond admirers like Milner, Khan’s meteoric success has attracted the financial support of a bevy of high-profile, socially minded backers, including Ann Doerr, the wife of billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr; Bill Gates; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; NewSchools Venture Fund, whose CEO is the former president of the California State Board of Education; and Google, whose chairman, Eric Schmidt, serves on the academy’s board. In total Khan has raised $16.5 million, with assurances of more to come.

“The numbers get really crazy when you look at the impact per dollar,” says Khan. “We have a $7 million operating budget, and we are reaching, over the course of a year, about 10 million students in a meaningful way. If you put any reasonable value on it, say $10 a year–and keep in mind we serve most students better than tutoring–and you are looking at, what, a 1,000% return?”

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Good questions, all, especially the one about effectiveness. I did ask Khan about this more than once, and it seems that — outside of a couple of school districts in the California Bay Area — they just don’t have (or aren’t sharing) this data yet. Its probably too early to say. But one might argue that the popularity of the site is a good indicator that students are getting value out of it.

As to the rest, there is only so much room in a magazine story — even one that ran 9 pages. The “credentialling” part of education (giving degrees, etc) is not something that Khan is tackling yet, but it is certainly on their radar screen.

You raise some interesting and important points–while everyone is quick to applaud the phenomenon of e-education and to see its potential value, there are a lot of unresolved issues–and some of the most important issues involved are not strictly educational.

One issue that isn’t really addressed is where this education is taking place. Regardless of its actual educational effectiveness, the current public school system plays a vital day care (for lack of a better term) role and an important socialization role. Who is going to watch the kids if they are going to school from home, especially in a single parent or two working parent family? If they are going to be doing this in a central location, exactly how is that going to be done and how is it going to be funded?

Lots of institutional and organizational issues involved when you apply this in a large scale to the public, with the intention of having it replace the public education system. That is not to say that it should not be done–but I am not seeing a lot of thought going into actually revamping the public system to leverage the potential here. Too many vested interests and political and social agendas–as well as cultural inertia and resistance to and fear of change.. and I do not think that the major resistance to this is going to come from teachers.

A self-paced system works well for the self-motivated–whether that motivation arises from desire or need–but the system is somewhat less effective when motivation is low or non-existent. This is an ongoing problem in public education. Sometimes people aren’t interested in learning things (even if they ARE important or useful or are needed to understand something that is coming later).

An interesting article and something with a lot of potential–but this educational approach is a long way from what it needs to be to replace the existing system–if that is even actually possible in the near term (next 20 years).

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. I don’t think even the most radical of e-entrepreneurs is advocating that schools be abandoned and kids learn entirely from home; rather they are looking to radically transform what activities happen in the classroom (perhaps getting rid of lectures altogether).

Motivation — or lack there of — is certainly an issue, but one might argue that it is already a big issue and kids seem to like learning this way better.

Altering educational methodologies will help somewhat with motivation, particularly if learning can become more immersive–but in order to do that we need to do more than replace lectures with videos (which are often nothing more than lectures with fancier graphics).

Gaming and simulation is potentially a extremely effective approach as it teaches more than information and provides opportunities for application and innovation on the part of students.

I don’t think that many people are advocating that schools should be abandoned–but, on the other hand, I am not seeing (in the popular or general literature) a lot of discussion about how to meld e-education and traditional education–or about other, non-academic, aspects of education that e-education does not easily address. I am not saying that the discussion does not necessarily exist–but perhaps that it lacks enough “sexy-ness” to be brought into the public discussion.

I think that it is, perhaps, time we start to seriously look at these things from a variety of perspectives–educational, financial, and cultural.

I have been following Khan since he started letting us know how he was helping family to learn. Most of what he advocates and that is now becoming mainstream are the ideas that I and Patrick Suppes had back at Stanford and San Francisco State in the late 1960′s. My own MBA thesis was titled “Computer Assisted Instruction in the Home” and that was done in 1970. www.edlyell.com has many of the articles, requested radical idea advice from Governor’s and others that I have helped get the ed tech ideas, standards based education and Value Added Measurement, along with abolishing Tenure. Having served on State Boards of Education, ECS, and other efforts for 4 decades I am pleased to see these innovative ideas emerging.

I was invited by the NY Regents and addressed the deans of education for New York’s universities in 1994 to wake them up to what is now current reality. Back then I warned them that if they did not move public education into more productivity using technology then public schools would be replaced by private. I urge readers to help us develop new governance and funding models to make education, including university, more productive and accessible. Lewis Gestner, former IBM, has it correct that we need to abolish 18,000 local school boards and/or create a better management system for the future. Perhaps local boards should just facilitate lineages and partnerships with multiple providers, not just the local buildings.

Mr. Khan and others assume and force a groupthink for conformity to the following idea: everyone hates sitting in a classroom in order to learn. Bernice McCarthy (4Mat) defines four learning styles. Only one style really consists of a strong prevalence of online / computer learning. The other styles consist of face-to-face physical social gatherings (not social media), traditional lecture and test-taking, and considerations of creativity as a learning style, no matter if computer-based or not. In other words, not everyone prefers online learning or watching videos. The conformity to Kahn’s style of learning is based on people making money using gadgets, glitz, glamor and entertainment, and never considering the diversity of human beings. The whole idea for business today appears to be: create human slaves or robots. Use assembly lines as Nazi-sympathizer, Henry Ford, proposed for (and revolutionized) automobile assembly. Humans are not gadgets, slaves or robots.

Funny. Politically, Democrats are accused of throwing money at a problem. Republican business people – greedily hording huge sums of money – prefer to throw technology at a problem.

Again, people are not slaves, robots, gadgets, or even blueberries. Each one of us needs to be treated with respect, not like an “economic unit” or a device on an assembly line.